Conservatives really hate education


Let’s start calling students names.

“College doesn’t look like it’s fun anymore. I mean, have you seen how miserable and how miserable-looking a lot of the students are?

“They’re deliberately like ugly-fying themselves. You see them on TikTok. They’re out of shape, they’re asexual. They’re rejecting the truth in beauty.

“They all look like rejects from a loony bin. I’d steer clear of college, too.”

I’ll have you know that all of my students are brilliant, beautiful, and sane. (Near as I can tell — some of them are just black squares on Zoom.)

Keep in mind that the guy talking about students being ugly-fied is Greg Gutfeld.

None of my students look that awful.

Comments

  1. blf says

    (This is a partial & reconstructed cross-post from poopyhead’s current Infinite Thread XXIV.)

    Not a snark as such (but perhaps could be one with a bit of care over a sensitive topic), Why oh why don’t kids these days look hot, laments Fox News host, 58:

    Greg Gutfeld’s creepy rant is just the latest example of the US right’s obsession with sex

    Fox host, 58, complains college kids not hot any more
    Kids these days, eh? They’re all deliberately ugly-fying themselves. That’s according to Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, anyway. The 58-year-old recently went on a weird tirade about how college students aren’t adhering to his beauty standards. You see them on TikTok, they’re out of shape, asexual, Gutfeld said on Thursday, during a conversation about college loans[!]. They’re rejecting the truth in beauty, they all look like rejects from a loony bin.

    There’s nothing particularly surprising about a Fox anchor going on a creepy rant about the physical appearance of people three decades younger than him. Ninety per cent of the “news” on Fox, after all, seems to be bizarre commentary on how women look. (Remember when they speculated about whether anyone would listen to congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez if she was fat and in her 60s?)

    However, Gutfeld’s little outburst is worth noting because it underscores just how sex-obsessed rightwingers are. The party of supposedly small government is constantly inserting itself into other people’s pants. They want to ban sex education in schools; they want to restrict contraception; they want to force women to give birth; they want to ban women from wearing revealing clothes; they want to complain that college students aren’t wearing revealing enough clothes. Republicans don’t have any meaningful or coherent policies, they just have a fixation on controlling women.

    While rightwingers are busy sexualizing college students young enough to be their own kids they’re also, of course, simultaneously shouting about how liberals are groomers who are trying to recruit children. The [thugs’s –blf] moral panic over “grooming”, it must be said, is starting to look a lot like projection. Let’s not forget, after all, that Matt Gaetz, a sitting Republican congressman is still under investigation for underage sex trafficking. Meanwhile Matt Walsh, a prominent rightwing commentator, has suggested that we should be pushing for more teenage girls to marry and get pregnant because it is technically when they’re at their most fertile. The party of family values, ladies and gentlemen!

    Gutfeld’s spiel on asexual college students, doesn’t just exemplify the right’s sex-obsession — it’s also an example of the Republican’s fixation with attacking higher education. […]

  2. NitricAcid says

    His only experience with college was watching “Revenge of the Nerds” and “College Girls Gone Wild”, so that’s the standard he’s expecting.

  3. birgerjohansson says

    (Looks at host)
    Reptilian shape-changer if I ever saw one. Don’t pick on his age! 58 is no big age for big reptiles so he has not yet reached middle age.

  4. Oggie: Mathom says

    This fixation on the way people looks is weird. Especially considering who the leaders of the conservative (bowel) movement are. Trump? Stone? Bannon? Johnson? None look sexy (to me (YMMV)). None look dignified (to me (YMMV)). None look handsome (to me (YMMV)). None look like anyone you would trust to balance your tyres, much less run a country into the ground (to me (YMMV)). None look healthy (to me (YMMV)).

  5. Oggie: Mathom says

    Hit submit too soon (I hate the freakin’ fingering pad and buttons at the bottom).

    This fixation on the way people looks is weird. Especially considering who the leaders of the conservative (bowel) movement are. Trump? Stone? Bannon? Johnson? None look sexy (to me (YMMV)). None look dignified (to me (YMMV)). None look handsome (to me (YMMV)). None look like anyone you would trust to balance your tyres, much less run a country into the ground (to me (YMMV)). None look healthy (to me (YMMV)). Yet they are endlessly fascinated with how women look. They are endlessly fascinated with the perceived ‘ugliness’ of liberals, the educated, the enemy. Bizarro.

  6. Jazzlet says

    It’s also about putting people off getting an education in the first place – an ignorant workforce/electorate is a compliant workforce/electorate.

  7. wzrd1 says

    Well, it’s nice to know that the GOP thinks that college is for peeping and obviously not for a foundation for a professional career.
    Knowing that, whyinhell would anyone want their valueless opinion on anything beyond how to spill garbage from the trashcan?
    Well, that and I’m sure they gave great tips on self-gratification.

    As for their predilection for great attention to what’s inside of my pants, if they set up an appointment in advance, they’re welcome inside to find out. I’ll wear Depends, so that they’ll have peers with them during the inspection.
    Otherwise, they’re just going to be flatus out of luck.

  8. raven says

    “College doesn’t look like it’s fun anymore. I mean, have you seen how miserable and how miserable-looking a lot of the students are?

    He does have a point although it isn’t the point he thinks it is.

    College has gotten incredibly expensive over the last few decades. The only way most students can pay for it is by taking out enormous loans. Loans that they can’t discharge in bankruptcy and may end up with for their entire lives.
    This is new and no wonder they are miserable.

    I would be miserable too.
    I graduated debt free and flat broke from a good state school in the mid 1970s. This wasn’t the least bit unusual at the time.

    In 2020, bachelor’s degree earners from public and private nonprofit four-year schools who graduated with student debt had an average debt of $28,400.

    Now, you are looking at graduating with almost $30,000 in debt. Often it is a lot more.

    OTOH, I live in an area with a lot of college students.
    They don’t look miserable and they aren’t miserable looking any more than they were in the 1970s,
    Mostly they look like young people having fun.
    I suppose they only look miserable when they get their tuition bills and check their loan balances.

  9. unclefrogy says

    and they complain that colleges are hostile to conservative ideas. makes you wonder just what they are on about, what really is it?
    I look at that guy and others like him and I marvel at how constrained by convention they seem, they look almost hog tied and shorn and forced into a mold of some kind, that continues to deny their humanity and instead of “rebelling” against that that they hate try to force everyone else to do the same

  10. cartomancer says

    Sometimes I think it would be amusing to wave a wand and saddle middle aged and elderly straight men with the same kinds of toxic beauty standards our society applies to women (and gay men apply to themselves, because we’re self-loathing idiots the lot of us). Amusing at first, but the mass collapse into abject ruin would soon be a drag to clean up.

    Mind you it is a small victory of sorts. After all, these buffoons know that in terms of intelligence and political good sense the youth far outstrips them, so if playground insults are all they have left then clearly something is going well.

  11. birgerjohansson says

    The brain content of the tories is subtly different, but equally depressing.
    Silver lining: There is not something analog to the MAGA crowd, the cries for ever more extreme policies come from groups overlapping with the conservative party itself, like the ERG.
    When – not if- the tories go down, so does the influence of their puppetmasters.
    In USA the tumors have spread widely and will not go away with a few idiot politicians.
    .
    Oops, this got depressing.
    In regard to the host in question, he will be out of a job if Diebold and the others suing Fox News manages to bankrupt them.

  12. kome says

    Greg is 58. College students are mostly 18-22. You kind of get the feeling that he really wants to be making the kinds of comments Matt Walsh makes, and say these things about high schoolers or middle schoolers.

  13. hemidactylus says

    PZ…if memory serves you have taken your readers into consideration by putting spider pics under the fold. Why couldn’t you have done that with the photo of Greg Gutfeld? That came at me quite unexpectedly.

  14. Tethys says

    He certainly sounds like all the jocks who go to college to major in keggers with his fraternity bros.

    Most people go to college for an education, not for “fun”. Nobody on any college campus is trying to attract this fish belly white old man. That’s his actual complaint!?

    I’m sure modern college kids are just as attractive as they were back when the long haired freaky hippies were getting attacked by warmongering squares.

  15. brightmoon says

    Misogyny, homophobia, ignorant . Thanks for reminding me why I can’t stand these people!

  16. magistramarla says

    My 23 year old grandson recently moved from Seattle to New York to attend a SUNY liberal arts college.
    During COVID, he lived with his parents and maxed out the classes that he could take from the Houston area community college, where they lived at the time. His child psychologist step-dad worked with him on his slight dyslexia (which his high school had refused to acknowledge or help him with) and taught him some time management skills.
    He’s absolutely loving college! His favorite class so far is philosophy. His roommates are music majors, so he brought out his trumpet and they bonded while making music together.
    He found himself a great job at a Brazilian steakhouse, manning the reception desk, and he gets to eat meals there whenever he completes a shift. He even takes home leftovers to his roomies whenever he works a closing shift.
    His family is sure that he was hired because of his swimmer’s physique and the Fabio looks from growing his hair out during COVID. He’s having the time of his life, and learning some wonderful lessons in college.
    I’m sure he would have a great rebuttal to this right-winger.

  17. lanir says

    That guy needs a refresh on his terrible ideas. At least try to make your ignorant nonsense sound a little original. Instead this is the same tired conservative jackassery that’s been around for centuries: an absolute terror of trying to control what’s in their own pants coupled with over the top attempts to control what’s in everyone else’s pants. It’s nothing but a fragile attempt to compensate for their inadequacies and shortcomings. I’m sure it’s simply a coincidence that so many of their ideas require that other people take responsibility for the problems conservatives have and pay for conservative failures.

    Conservatives please come up with more original ideas. This stuff is thousands of years old and the reason it’s not more popular is because of how obviously terrible it is. Take responsibility for what’s in your own pants for once.

  18. imthegenieicandoanything says

    “They all look like rejects from a loony bin.” He would know, of course.
    And that’s not the NICE loony bin, full of mild-mannered, pixelated oddballs who wouldn’t – couldn’t! – harm a fly, but the loony bin where the lobotomized Hannibal Lecters and impotent Freddy Kreugers find compromise, companionship and confirmation among those like themselves.

    This loony bin, of course, now has a presence on social media as “Truth Social” and “The Right Stuff.”

    *Proving, ad nauseum, that one thing MAGA fascists can never be accused of is failing to dive head first from the top of the Empire State Building of their minds into their own damp sponge of unintended irony.

  19. StevoR says

    Tangetial but :

    Remember when they speculated about whether anyone would listen to congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez if she was fat and in her 60s?

    To answer that rude and nasty question, Yes. I think quite a lot of people – myself included like listening to the non-conventionlly (stereotypically) sexually atttractive Miriam Margolyes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_Margolyes) and Dawn French (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_French ) and Magda Szubanski ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magda_Szubanski ) among others and, of course, for the merely older there’s Nancy Pelosi and the Bruituish (& Dutch etc..) Queen among other examples of respected and listened to older women.

    Just because they only listen to women they are seeking to have sex with doesn’t mean that’s anywhere near universal does it? Projection as per reichwing usual basically.

    Oh and the anti-intellectualism.. the sheer anti-intellectualism here..

  20. StevoR says

    ^ To say nothing of people’s ideas of “beauty” varying very widely too..

    Bruituish = British natch.

  21. Oggie: Mathom says

    StevoR:

    Just because they only listen to women they are seeking to have sex with

    Do you really think they actually listen to any women? Whether they see them as sexually usable or not? They may pretend to listen to women that they find appropriately young and attractive, but is this actual listening, or bobbing their head up and down in agreement as their mind goes into a “well, needless to say . . .” Penthouse Forum* scenario.

    Yes, I was a teenager during the appropriate time period**.

    ** If you don’t understand, ask a fifty- to sixty-year-old*** American man.

    *** Damn. I really am getting old.

  22. StevoR says

    @ ^ Oggie: Mathom : Yes. Fair points and I’m feeling old these days too FWIW.

    @ imthegenieicandoanything : “The Right Stuff.”

    The classic book and subsequent movie on the original Mercury 7 astronauts esp John Glenn & Alan Shepard and Chuck Yeager with the sound barrier breaking experimental jets? Hmm.. I’m guessing I’m missing the reference here?

  23. John Morales says

    StevoR, context. I didn’t need the reference, I am on the internet.

    The (fixed) quotation is “This loony bin, of course, now has a presence on social media as “Truth Social” and “The Right Stuff.””

    So no, it’s not a movie reference, it’s about a social presence on the internet.

    Easy enough to find, well under 5 seconds’ worth of effort.
    Far less time than it took me to type this comment for your edification.
    https://www.indy100.com/science-tech/the-right-stuff-dating-app

  24. unclefrogy says

    It’s nothing but a fragile attempt to compensate for their inadequacies and shortcomings

    there is a whole book in that statement. concerning all kinds of judgements and self criticisms.
    all learned and taught day to day baked in to western religion and culture as it is. a complete failure to comprehend the nature of ourselves and the history that got us here and cling to those judgments as if they were true as if by force they can be made real. never asking any questions that might disturb the favored illusion. taking us all down the drain with them.

  25. Louis says

    Happily I am not as old as some of the absolute geezers in here (OMG OLD PEOPLE! YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND US! I NEVER ASKED TO BE BORN!), but I am officially Old(TM). As in “old enough that university students are, whilst older than my kid, old enough to be my kid).

    When I am hanging around university campuses looking at the young women^, my thoughts are not “Ding dong! Hello you fine young filly!”, they are now, disappointingly, “Listen, love, you look cold, put some bloody clothes on.”^^.

    As is right and proper.^^^

    Louis

    ^I don’t do this. No one should do this.
    ^^Some exaggeration and falsehoods have been used for the purposes of NotSeriousness.
    ^^^Neither right, nor proper. Leave the young women alone Old Men. No. Bad Old Men. No! No dribbling. Their appearance is not our bloody business and never was/ Go back to eating soup and complaining about those new fangled mobile phones we have now.

  26. John Morales says

    Louis, I know what you mean, caveats and all.

    When I am hanging around university campuses looking at the young women^, my thoughts are not “Ding dong! Hello you fine young filly!”, they are now, disappointingly, “Listen, love, you look cold, put some bloody clothes on.”^^.

    I fully endorse your sentiment, but also, there’s “what a magnificent specimen!” aspect when I see toned, young, healthy, fit, vibrant young women.
    Young men, too, though I’m about as hetero as they come.

    Young fillies, young stallions. There they are. Better than we were.
    Still young and foolish (mostly, obs there are exceptions), but better at the same stage in life.

    (Better nutrition, better medicine, better educated parents, better society, more resources, etc. No leaded gasoline, no ubiquitous smoking, no lead pipes for water, etc.)

  27. Louis says

    @John Morales, #26,

    I’m am getting a whiff of tweed and pipe smoke, the words “I have some important erotic statuary in my rooms which I obtained during my travels in Africa, my dear. I would be delighted to exhibit them to you. One is a very significant find.”, and something being covered up by the college.

    And yes, I generally think the Young People I encounter and definitely better than I was. Henry Rollins once postulated that Gen X-ers like me are the generation not only more outrageous than our parents, but more outrageous than our kids. Slayer and cocaine binges^ have been replaced by saving for mortgages they’ll never be able to afford…

    …wait. That’s a bad thing.

    Louis

    ^Never happened. NEVER. HAPPENED.

  28. John Morales says

    Louis, you give me too much credit.

    Still… “They’re deliberately like ugly-fying themselves.” is so very indicative of cluelessness.

    (Being a Pom and of an age, I’m guessing you are well aware of Punk)

  29. raven says

    Just because they only listen to women they are seeking to have sex with

    Do you really think they actually listen to any women?

    Just for future reference.
    Blow up sex dolls don’t talk.

  30. birgerjohansson says

    As I mentioned on another thread, the conservative saying app is a failure because not enough women are signing up.
    I imagine a million Gutfeld clones, wondering why women are not attracted by their obvious charm and wit. :)

  31. birgerjohansson says

    Spell check altered “dating app” to “saying app ” which must be rather confusing for the readers.

  32. Walter Solomon says

    Henry Rollins once postulated that Gen X-ers like me are the generation not only more outrageous than our parents, but more outrageous than our kids.

    Genexers more outrageous than Baby Boomers? Not even close.

  33. blf says

    Blow up sex dolls don’t talk.

    There seem to some which are claimed-to. I won’t provide any links (found using safe browsing / search practices), but, e.g., one claim “She is an ultra-realistic 3d sex doll and also an inflatable sex doll. You can make her moan too. As a talking sex doll, she comes with many unique features!” Absolutely no idea what it “says”, if actually anything other than the mentioned “moans”.

    Also a strong hint you wouldn’t want to order anything from that site, as it claims “HTTPS and MD5 encryption to ensure your privacy is secure”. HTTPS is fine, but, um MD5! Seriously? Ignoring that it’s not actually encryption (it’s a checksum (hash)), MD5 is absolutely not “secure”, and the relevant credit card transaction protocols / standards do not use it. When I was involved with that industry a few years ago, the SHA-2 family was the mandated “minimum” “secure” hash.

  34. Louis says

    @Walter Solomon, #33,

    Right. All Comers Outrageousness Off, Battle Royale, 360-Degree Debauch-O-Rama.

    Go!

    Louis

  35. Walter Solomon says

    Louis @35

    I’m actually a Millennial. My older brother was a Gen X and my Mom is a Boomer. Her stories are much wilder but I admit that’s anecdotal.

  36. Louis says

    @Walter Solomon, #36,

    A Millennial? You’re…nice.

    Big fan of Millennials. Decent people.

    Louis